Charles is working in the field of analytical games and contacted me after coming across Rethinking Wargames while working on an article about games, war and peace.

"My own chess variant, which would require two fairly accomplished story-tellers of roughly equal chess strength to play it, is one in which the game is played as in any chess game, following the usual rules, with the added proviso that at each move, the player should write a fictionalized account of the move, such that the combined narratives of the two players taken together in sequence of moves constitutes a story for publication.

The point is that each player then has two motives in making each move -- a chess-winning-motive, and a storytelling-collaborative-motive -- and the way they play will thuis reflect something that parallels human motivation, with its characteristic mix of survival drive and quest for self-actualization / spirituality."